Black Sabbath

It's that time again. Final Girl's Film Club has risen to kick your ass. This month with Black Sabbath.

I like Mario Bava pretty much across the board, and given the size of that board that’s a pretty big statement. I put him easily above the fun but uneven Fulci, and even the best of Argento. I like Bava when he’s making moody little gothic films or gigantic pop art monstrosities. I like Bava when he’s making horror movies, westerns, crime flicks, sex comedies, sci fi, and yes even when he’s making Viking movies. There’s no time period of Bava’s I don’t care for, hell there’s not even a movie of Bava’s I don’t care for (The possible exception being the influential but overrated Blood And Black Lace).

The point is I’m what you could mildly call pro Bava, and given that Black Sabbath is considered by many to be Bava’s finest (though I’d give the title to the Psychedelic little gothic chiller Kill Baby Kill), not to mention being the film that inspired a certain group of acid worn British Hippies to down tune their guitars and to stop singing about evil and start wailing like demon monks where eating their skin (Meaning that Mario Bava invented both Heavy Metal and The Modern Slasher movie BY ACCIDENT) I can basically watch this movie at anytime.

Black Sabbath is a great little horror movie, it’s only real flaw the fact that Bava puts his weakest segment last (Depending on what cut you watch. I was reviewing Anchor Bay’s version on You Tube) and stilted framing devise that features Boris Karloff first rambling (In its oddest moment the intro ends only to have Karloff reappear and start another not particularly easy to follow tangent.) and then explaining that you’ve just watched a movie.

The first segement, A Drop Of Water is the best, featuring a greedy nurse who is tormented by the spirit of a patient whose corpse she robs. It’s a great minimalist piece of horror cinema. A grisly morality play with an ending that just doesn’t quit. It’s like one of the greatest EC Comics never made.

The second episode is just as strong featuring Boris Karloff at his best as a vampire cursed to dine on his family members. Karloff pulls off one hell of a performance here, investing his creature with as much sorrow and genuine menace as he ever did in the classic Universal days. It’s the kind of swan song that you always hope your old favorite one’s get, fueled not just by nostalgia but by the fact that Karloff, unlike so many others never lost his talent.

Like I said Black Sabbath ends with a whimper rather then a bang. Its not that the last part is BAD exactly, its just not, special. A decent enough psychological giallo with a pretty nice darkly funny ending, but after the last two films it just doesn’t hold up.

Still Black Sabbath is the sort of flick that you can’t help but have a good time with, a dark genuinely malignant horror film that features a couple of masters at their best.

THE RETURN OF 31 DAYS OF HORROR: #20 City Of The Living Dead (AKA Gates Of Hell)

This is my entry in Hugo Stiglitz Makes Movies Italian Horror Blogothon. It's awesome. Go there.

EDIT And now its part of Final Girl's Film Club too! Call it laziness if you want I prefer the term synergy.


Lucio Fulci has always been the goofus to Argento and Bava’s gallant. It’s a matter of personal taste of course, one of those Beatles Vs. Rolling Stones things, but I’ve always been drawn to Bava’s darkly gothic fables, and Argento’s surreal dreamscapes more then Fulci’s beyond the pale splatter. Fulci’s films when compared to Bava’s or even Argento’s remind me of that one episode of South Park where Cartman met Bart Simpson. “What’s that kid? You sawed the head off a stautue? Wow. This guy cooked a kids parents then fed them to him." Have you ever seen Four From The Apocalypse? That weird guy from Bonnie And Clyde ended up feeding a bunch of cowboys a dead guy’s ass. AND HE WASN’T EVEN TRYING TO BE MEAN! It's not a put on. That level of perversion just seems to come just as naturally to Fulci as Michael J. Pollard’s ass serving instincts come to him. He’s not being malicious it’s just what he does. So why write about one of his films rather then one of their’s?

Well I don’t want to give the impression that I don’t thoroughly enjoy some of Fulci’s films. Zombie is always fun, The Beyond is a classic and deservedly so, and I have a particular affection for The House By The Cemetary, as it kind of plays like The Shining if both Kubrick and King had gone batshit insane.

Still neither can hold a candle to the mind melting lethal dose of crazy that is City Of The Living Dead. How crazy is City Of The Living Dead you ask? So crazy that it starts off with a priest hanging himself and that’s the least offensive thing you see in the movie. The Priest hangs himself which somehow causes the zombies to rise (Like many Fulci movies narrative clarity not so much). Teleporting, superstrong Zombies, which in my opinion is somewhat gilding the lily, cause that’s just how this movie rolls.

Meanwhile (a word I’ll be using a lot in this review) A Coven of witches psychically witnesses the event in New York causing one of their number to freak out and end up buried alive (long story). Then there’s a screaming ball of fire. The movie briefly turns into blacksploitation. Some guy’s sex with a blowup doll is interrupted by a rotting corpse. Then some guys in “Maine” drink in a bar that is obviously your Dad’s rec room while mirrors explode and the walls crack. Then the Zombie Ghost Priest makes a couple on lover’s lane vomit up their intestines. Also a woman casually admits her incestuous desire, and there’s a grave digger who looks uncannily like Vince Vaughn.

And that’s just the first twenty minutes.

Yay Fulci!

Guys this is a weird fucking movie. Let me say that again. This is a really. Really. Weird fucking movie.

The thing about Fulci is he’s not a hack. Anyone can throw a bunch of crazy shit at the wall to distract you from the fact that they don’t know a thing about making movies. Hell you just have to look at Slaughter High to prove that. Fulci knows how to put a sequence together. The scene where Mary wakes up in her grave is as clautrophobic and terrible buried alive scene as I can remember. His visuals are tremendous (check the blood pouring into the milk). And even scenes featuring such as over the top as The Zombie Ghost Priest (From here on out referred to as the ZGP) forcing folks on lover lane to vomit up sheep intestines, has a real sense of dread and unease.

The film does calm down enough to be said to have a plot involving a hard boiled reporter and said buried alive witch attempting to close the portal of hell that ZGP has somehow opened before Halloween. Though it does keep going off on these bizarre diversions such as when an enraged guy murders his daughter’s boyfriend with a power drill. Still the way Fulci weaves these batshit insane vignettes with the main narrative of the film makes me mourn the fact that he never made a Stephen King Movie.

City Of The Living Dead shares a lot in common with The Beyond, Fulci’s most famous flick. But I prefer it to it’s more famous big brother. And not least of all because the whole vomiting of the sheep guts scene is one of the most batshit crazy things I’ve ever witnessed in a horror film.

Like most Fulci flicks City Of The Living Dead is loud, gory and if you understand what happened at the end you deserve a cookie and probably also a doctorate. But it is a whole hell of a lot of fun.